ABC’s Katie Couric interviews Note Dame football star Manti Te’o during an exclusive taped interview in New York in this ABC handout released January 23, 2013. The interview is his first on camera since news broke last week that his story about his girlfriend’s cancer death – and her existence altogether- was exposed as a fraud. Couric’s exclusive interview with Te’o and his parents, Brian and Ottilia, will be broadcast on “Katie” January 24, 2013. REUTERS/Disney-ABC/ Lorenzo Bevilaqua (UNITED STATES – Tags: SPORT FOOTBALL SOCIETY ENTERTAINMENT) NO SALES. NO ARCHIVES. FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS. THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. IT IS DISTRIBUTED, EXACTLY AS RECEIVED BY REUTERS, AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS

NEW YORK — The person Manti Te’o says was pretending to be his online girlfriend told the Notre Dame linebacker “I love you” in voicemails that were played during his interview with Katie Couric.

Taped earlier this week and broadcast Thursday, the hour-long talk show featured three voicemails Te’o claims were left for him last year. Te’o said they were from the person he believed to be Lennay Kekua, a woman he had fallen for online but never actually met.

“What I went through was real,” Te’o said. “The feelings, the pain, the sorrow. That was all real.”

After the first message was played, Te’o said: “It sounds like a girl, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Couric responded.

The interview was the All-American’s first on camera since his tale of inspired play after the Sept. 12 death of his girlfriend unraveled as a bizarre hoax. Te’o’s parents appeared with him for part of the interview and backed up his claim that he wasn’t involved in the fabrication, saying they, too, had spoken on the phone with a person they believed to be Kekua.

Couric addressed speculation the tale was concocted by Te’o as a way to cover up his sexual orientation. Asked if he were gay, Te’o said “no” with a laugh. “Far from it. Far from that.”

He also said he was “scared” and “didn’t know what to do” after receiving a call Dec. 6 — two days before the Heisman Trophy presentation — from a person who claimed to be his “dead” girlfriend.

Couric suggested the person who left those messages might have been Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, a 22-year-old man from California who Te’o said has apologized to him for the hoax.

“Do you think that could have been a man on the other end of the phone?” she asked.

“Well, it didn’t sound like a man,” Te’o said. “It sounded like a woman. If he somehow made that voice, that’s incredible. That’s an incredible talent to do that.”

Meanwhile, the woman whose pictures were used in fake online accounts for Kekua said Tuiasosopo confessed to her in a phone conversation as the scheme unraveled. Diane O’Meara said Tuiasosopo, a former high school classmate, told her he’d been “stalking” her Facebook profile for five years and taking photos.

“He said he wanted to stop the relationship between Lennay and Manti, but Manti didn’t want Lennay to break up with him,” she said. “He said he tried to stop the game many times.”

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